Most advice about meta descriptions and title tags quotes character limits that
nobody can verify, because search engines rewrite snippets on their own schedule.
This article takes the opposite approach. It documents the title and description
rules enforced by our own static shell renderer, the code that produces every title
tag and meta description on this site, and shows the measurable consequences of
crossing each threshold. You get rules you can count, because a build script applies
them on every page.
The title rule, exactly as the code applies it
Every page title passes through one normalization function before it reaches the
HTML. Three rules run in order:
1. All whitespace collapses to single spaces.
2. A title shorter than 20 characters gets the suffix " - Free Online Tools"
appended.
3. A title longer than 90 characters is cut to 87 characters, then the trailing
partial word is removed. No ellipsis is added.
The truncation detail matters. The cut happens at 87 characters, and if character 87
lands mid-word, that entire word is dropped. A 95-character title does not display
95 or 90 characters of your copy. It displays the first few complete words that fit
inside 87, and the ending simply vanishes with no marker.
The suffix rule that eats your budget
Titles carry a brand suffix, and the suffix counts against the 90:
- Blog posts use Article Title - WebRecast, where the appended part is 11 characters
including its separator.
- Tool and landing pages use the title followed by a pipe and the site name.
Do the arithmetic for blog posts. If your article title exceeds 79 characters, the
combined title exceeds 90, and the renderer cuts it. Two things can be lost. Your
carefully written ending disappears, and if the cut lands inside the brand name,
the brand goes with it. The deterministic writing rule is therefore: keep article
titles at 79 characters or fewer, and the suffix survives every time.
Short titles trigger the opposite behavior. A one-word tool title of 6 characters
becomes 6 characters plus " - Free Online Tools". The padding prevents an empty
looking result page entry, but it means several short pages can end with the same
boilerplate suffix. Short is safe, but short and indistinct is a duplication risk.
The description rule, and why 50 is a floor
Meta descriptions pass through a parallel function with the same shape:
1. Whitespace collapses.
2. A description shorter than 50 characters gets a fixed sentence appended, one
that ends by describing free browser-based WebRecast tools.
3. A description longer than 180 characters is cut to 177, the trailing partial
word is removed, and three dots are appended.
The floor is the dangerous side. Write a 30-character description and the renderer
silently pads it with the same 60-odd characters used on every other thin page.
Scale that across a site and you have manufactured dozens of near-duplicate meta
descriptions, which is precisely the pattern content audits flag. The thin
description you did not finish writing becomes boilerplate you shipped.
The ceiling is more honest but still costly. A 200-character description ends at 177
characters plus three dots, so the last thing a searcher sees may be a promise cut
in half. Since the cut removes only the end, the working rule is to front-load: the
keyword and the value statement belong in the first 100 characters, and anything
expendable belongs at the end.
Where these strings come from
On this site the pipeline is deterministic. A blog article's title tag is its title
field from the content data, and its meta description is its summary field, both
normalized by the rules above. The same normalized strings are reused verbatim in
the Open Graph and Twitter card tags, so one overlong value degrades the search
snippet, the link preview, and the share card together.
That reuse is the argument for writing the summary as a real description rather than
an afterthought. It is not one field. It is the same text rendered in three places
you never see side by side.
Write a title and description against these rules
Apply this sequence to every page before you publish:
1. Write the title, then count its characters including spaces.
2. For a blog post, add 11 for the suffix. If the total exceeds 90, cut the title
to 79 characters or fewer yourself, so the ending you choose is the ending that
ships.
3. Place the primary keyword in the first half of the title, because truncation
removes the end and never the start.
4. Write the description between 50 and 180 characters. Below 50 invokes the
boilerplate, above 180 loses your closing phrase.
5. Verify the description carries one concrete promise and one differentiator, not
a list of keywords.
6. After publishing, inspect the built HTML and confirm the title and description
that shipped are the ones you intended, not the truncated versions.
The honest limits of any length rule
Character counts are our renderer's discipline, and discipline is all they are.
Search engines choose what to display, and they rewrite both titles and descriptions
whenever their algorithm prefers other text from the page. No length compliance
guarantees your snippet survives intact, and no rule in this article changes that.
What the rules do guarantee is different and more useful. Your metadata is never
empty, never accidentally duplicated by padding unless you write under the floor,
and never silently mangled in ways you cannot predict, because every transformation
above is deterministic and testable in the build output.
Checklist before you publish
- Title counted with the 11-character blog suffix included.
- Title at or under 79 characters for articles, so the brand survives.
- Keyword in the first half of title and description.
- Description between 50 and 180 characters.
- One idea per description, no keyword stacking.
- Built HTML inspected once to confirm what actually shipped.
- Click-through rate checked in Search Console before and after any rewrite.
Title tags and meta descriptions remain the cheapest traffic levers on any site,
because they cost writing time and nothing else. The rules above turn that writing
into something you can verify character by character in your own build, which beats
arguing about limits nobody published.
Did you audit your own titles against your renderer or CMS rules, and how many were
being cut without your knowledge? Generate yours with our
[meta tag generator](https://webrecast.com/en/meta-tag-generator) and count what
actually ships.
